Troy Renck

New NAEP results explore link between vocabulary, reading skill

Colorado Classroom covers local and state education issues affecting K-12 and higher education students in the state of Colorado.

A new test has confirmed the link between vocabulary and reading comprehension and created a systematic way to assess students' grasp of word meaning, according to new data released Thursday by the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

Representative samples of fourth-, eighth- and 12th-graders from across the country answered questions that measured not only how well students understood reading passages but also how they arrived at the meaning of specific key words.

Colorado's fourth- and eighth-graders scored higher than the national average on both vocabulary and reading comprehension in 2011 results.

Only 11 states tested 12th-graders in a pilot program, and Colorado wasn't among them.

The state's girls scored higher than boys in fourth grade, but there was no significant gender gap in eighth grade.

Nationally, students who scored higher on the vocabulary questions also scored higher in reading comprehension. Compared with results from 2009, there was no statistically significant change.

The vocabulary questions didn't ask students to define words but offered multiple- choice answers for what a given word meant in the context of the reading passage. It's the "intersection of word knowledge and passage comprehension" that offers insight, according to NAEP.

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"The format of the test gave us the opportunity to peer into what students are doing with the words as they're going through the text and trying to understand it," said University of Pittsburgh researcher Margaret McKeown. "It gives us insight into what happens in comprehension and reminds us that a good score overall on comprehension doesn't mean that a student understood everything in a passage. It gives us a snapshot of what's missing and whether it could be due to vocabulary."

McKeown added that teachers could find the test's examples helpful in revealing how students figure out a word's meaning from context.

"That's never been put into assessments before," she said. "Other tests ask for a word in isolation, or a definition. So this is embedding what we know about vocabulary into assessment."

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